Cautious advance to Bagdad

Efforts to win Iraqi trust made with much care

CALVIN WOODWARDAssociated Press Writer

Published Monday, March 31, 2003

Allied soldiers inched toward Baghdad on Sunday and pressed their campaign on a southern redoubt of Saddam Hussein loyalists, trying at every turn to gain trust from Iraqi citizens and stay safe from those who may be combatants in disguise.

The military campaign has increasingly become a confidence-building one, too, and not only in Iraq. U.S. war leaders, deployed on the Sunday airwaves, defended their strategy as a sound one and cast the painstaking pace of recent days as a virtue.

"We have the power to be patient in this, and we're not going to do anything before we're ready," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

U.S. and British allies reported increased contacts with ordinary Iraqis on many fronts Sunday, a development measured -- like the march toward Baghdad -- in wary steps.

The reason for the caution was clear: persistent danger from plainclothes killers and warnings from Iraqi officials that there will be more suicide attacks like the one that took the lives of four Americans in Najaf. Iraqis said some 4,000 Arabs have come to Iraq to help attack the invaders.

click photo to enlarge

Marines make their way in the desert near Nasi-riyah, Sunday.

AP Photo

Airstrikes on Baghdad continued Sunday night and into today against Iraqi leadership targets, command and control centers and communications facilities, Pentagon officials said. A fire was burning at the government's Information Ministry after the overnight strikes.

The Army's 101st Airborne Division surrounded Najaf on Sunday and was in position to begin rooting out the paramilitary forces inside the city, said Command Sgt. Maj. Marvin Hill.

In Nasiriyah, where fighting has been fierce for a week, Marines secured buildings held by an Iraqi infantry division that contained large caches of weapons and chemical decontamination equipment.

A Marine UH-1 Huey helicopter crashed Sunday night at a forward supply and refueling point in southern Iraq, said a spokesman, 1st Lt. John Niemann, in Kuwait. Three people aboard were killed and one was injured in the crash that occurred while the helicopter was taking off.

Questions grew in Washington over the war's pace.

Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said the U.S.-led invasion is clearly facing more Iraqi resistance than anticipated and the war plan will probably have to be adjusted to deal with that.

"I consider them not to be trivial setbacks," he said on CNN's "Late Edition," but rather "in the category of major problems."

Gen. Tommy Franks, the coalition commander, said: "One never knows how long a war will take."

Close to 100,000 U.S. service members are in Iraq, supported by about 200,000 in the theater and with 100,000 more on the way.

U.S. officials said coalition ground forces were closing in on Baghdad from the south, west and north -- the southern front lines now 49 miles from the capital. Myers said airstrikes have reduced some units of the Republican Guard, Saddam's best-trained forces, to less than half their prewar capacity.

British troops moved into villages on the fringes of Basra, the southern city where an outnumbered but tough core of Saddam loyalists have held off the coalition for about a week.

Up to 1,000 Royal Marines and supporting troops, backed by heavy artillery and tanks, staged a commando assault in a Basra suburb, killing some 30 Iraqi fighters and destroying a bunker and several tanks. Officials said Operation James -- named for James Bond -- was the Marines' largest mission so far.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington that the British are getting "increasing assistance from the local people as to where the death squads are located, where the thugs are. And they're systematically working them over."

The British first said they had captured an Iraqi general, but British military spokesman Will MacKinlay later told BBC television that the report was wrong, attributing the mistake to "the fog of war." The spokesman said British troops had killed a number of Iraqi officers. Baath party enforcers have shot civilians trying to flee Basra and forced regular troops trying to quit the fight to stay in it.

Rumsfeld offered a frank assessment of why many Iraqis have been slow to embrace allied soldiers even in some areas of the country unfriendly to Saddam.

He noted that the Shiite population in and around Basra rose up against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War. "The United States and the coalition forces left, and they were slaughtered" by the tens of thousands, Rumsfeld said. For that reason, "I'm inclined not to urge people to rise up until we're close and we can be helpful."